Women at the 2010 Whitney Biennial

When the going gets tough, is that good news for women artists? Seems so, judging by the roster of this year’s Whitney Biennial. For the first time, a majority of the 55 artists included in that perennially controversial survey of contemporary American art are women, whose ambitions and ages run the gamut of expectations. Dedicated draftswoman and downtown bad girl Aurel Schmidt will be showing a mural-sized drawing of a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man, titled Master of the Universe: FlexMaster 3000 (left).“It’s a mythical figure,” the 27-year-old artist says of her Minotaur, “a creator and destroyer, a mixture of masculine power and illusions,” composed of diverse elements, from beer cans and cigarette butts to bits of imagery appropriated from the art of Jeff Koons and Robert Mapplethorpe. Self-taught and from small-town British Columbia, Schmidt arrived in New York five years ago and quickly made a name for herself with precisely rendered drawings, often riffing off of Modernist masters like Picasso, but incorporating the detritus and anxieties of contemporary urban bohemia. (Dakis Joannou bought four of them from her first group show.) The recession, she says, has given artists a new freedom. “Before, it was all about the gallery, the dinner, the party,” she says. “There was so much pressure on artists to be fabulous. Now it’s a good time to take risks.” Multimedia artist and California native Pae White has been taking risks all along, with stealthy and whimsically poetic works—cast-iron barbecue grills in the shape of stylized animals, for example, or a woven theater curtain made out of what appears to be crumpled tin foil—that turn received notions of artmaking on their head. For the Biennial, curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari have requested one of this shape-shifting artist’s “smoke” tapestries. “I wanted to challenge the heroic tradition of European tapestries,” says White, 46, who is attracted to the “endless potential” of fabric and whose influences range from experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton to the popular textile designer Vera Neumann. “To see if cotton and polyester could go through a dreamlike transformation into something very different from their own materiality,” she explains, “something like smoke, that’s barely there.” What is at once more ephemeral and more all-pervasive than the weather? Yet that is the subject of Los Angeles–based artist Kelly Nipper’s video Weather Center. Re-creating Witch Dance (1914), a nearly lost work by modern-dance pioneer Mary Wigman, Nipper’s piece takes the form of a continuous video loop in which a dancer, wearing a very German Expressionist mask and robe, beats the floor, twirls, and gyrates, her chaotic geometry gradually unleashing the witch’s mystical power. “All of my work at its core deals with communication, and with how technology both brings people together and separates them,” says the 38-year-old artist, who is fascinated by systems of measure, whether meteorological or the early methods of dance notation developed by Wigman’s teacher, Rudolf Laban. Nipper herself is thrilled to be included in this multigenerational Biennial alongside her own teacher from graduate studies at CalArts, the radical pedagogue and artist Michael Asher. “Francesco keeps asking him, ‘Are you going to take apart the museum?’ ” a bemused Nipper recounts. “We’re all a bit concerned that he may very well do that.”